Thanks to my coauthors Nicholas Coops (@irssubc.bsky.social), Chris Mulverhill, @txominhermos.bsky.social, @coleburton.bsky.social, and Stephen Ban for their help and guidance along the way!

I'm really excited about this methodology - it provides a data-driven approach to assess ecological integrity that strongly aligns with many of its definitions, and the coarsened exact matching approach can be used to assess reference state availability! Stay tuned for more :)

We then compared these dissimilarity values to the Canadian human footprint, and found that high levels of anthropogenic pressures impact structural integrity, but not functional integrity.

We combined coarsened exact matching and sigma dissimilarity to compare all environmentally similar forests to high-quality protected reference states in Strathcona Park which accounts for protected area biases and accounts for collinearity between and within structural and functional attributes.